Astronomy: Discovery Of Uranus By William Herschel

Born in Germany as Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel, it wasn’t until his was 30 when he discovered what his true passion was. One night while he was looking at the night sky with his sister Caroline, he discovered Uranus and several of moons around other gas giants. While he was alive, he compiled a catalogue of 2,500 celestial objects that are still being used in today’s society. While in his early life he mainly studied music with his sister. His sister, Caroline was the first women to discover a comet, and the first women to get given a paid scientific position and to receive an honorary membership into the Royal Society. William Herschel will come up with the Theory of The Evolution of The Stars.

Herschel just happened to be studying the stars between 10-11pm. What he did not expect was to find a planet on that fateful night. Herschel thought that what he had spotted was a big star, but then decided that it was a comet. However, he quickly realized that this was no star, it was much more! In this situation, technology made all the difference. Without these high-powered magnifiers, it would have been easily forgotten. Once he formed a hypothesis, how tried to figure out what the planet was not. It was much larger than the other planets. Once he realized that this was an actual planet, he wrote a letter to his colleague about it. This was an exciting discovery for 1787! It was the first planet to be discovered in a more modern

William Herschel was a musician and an astronomer. The motivation that drove William Herschel to the discovery of Uranus was his obsession with astronomy and the heavens. He charted the stars with a telescope he built himself, he then discovered a “comet” which really was the planet Uranus, but he initially didn’t realize it. He noticed the “comet” had moved and decided that his annotations on the position of the “comet” had been written down incorrectly. Herschel wanted to know the dimensions, and position of the “comet”. He carefully measured the location and diameter of the comet for some time and discovered its journey as parallax to “our side of the sun” on a daily basis. In 1782 Herschel finally called the comet his planet. The knowledge

Frederick William Herschel was a British astronomer and composer. In 1774 he constructed his first telescope with which he spent the next 9 years studying the sky. After the completion of several catalogues, on March 13, 1781, he made an amazing discovery. The planet Uranus. This was an extraordinary discovery, and because of it, Herschel was made Court Astronomer by King George the Third, which was indeed a great honor. Later on he became the first President of the Royal Astronomer Society, in 1820. One of the key people leading to his Astronomy breakthroughs was Reverend John Michell, who was making ground-breaking views on astronomy and the construction of telescopes. Michell and Herschel met, as Herschel was a composer, and Michell was

William Herschel discovered the seventh planet from the sun, Uranus. This was the first planet discovered using a telescope. William Herschel started to question if Uranus was a planet or a star while looking at Uranus. From using a telescope, William Herschel was able to tell that Uranus was a planet and not a star. Previous astronomers thought that Uranus was a star and not a planet because they didn’t use a telescope. William Herschel named the planet Georgium Sidus (“Georgian Planet”) after the King of England. There was another astronomer named Johann Bode, who wanted to name the planet “Uranus” after an Olympian god of the heavens. By the 1950’s, the planet’s name was accepted as Uranus. The discovery of Uranus relates to the scientific

The discovery of Uranus was a startling observation. It is possible that people had seen Uranus prior to 1781, but none had realized what exactly they were seeing – most assumed it was a star. William Herschel is credited for the discovery of Uranus, but when he observed it through his telescope, he didn’t think it was a planet either. He hypothesized that it was a comet, because it was moving too fast to be a star. It wasn’t until his observations were peer reviewed, by other astronomers who studied it and found that its orbit was nearly circular. This lead them to classify it as a planet. At the time of the discovery, the original model of the solar system was only five planets (plus the sun, and the moon). The known planets had been observed

“Perhaps most important for the science of astronomy is that the discovery of Uranus began the search for other undiscovered planets in our solar system. It was the beginning of a second phase in the discovery of planets, during which Neptune and Pluto were discovered.”

Before the discovery of Uranus there was thought to only be seven heavenly bodies, the Sun, the moon, and five planets. It was common knowledge at the time that they were the only other objects in the Solar System and there would be no others. It changed in 1781 when William Herschel discovered a new object, which later became known as Uranus. (Teerikorni, 111) This all began in 1773 when Herschel started grinding his own lenses and even mounting a mirror with a five and a half foot focal length. He continued in 1776 with larger telescopes. “In July he added a 20ft, and telescopes of 7, 10 and 20 feet becames his common working instruments for some years to come.” (Bennet, 75-76) All of this tinkering eventually led to the discovery of a new

There was much debate about what the name of the planet would be. Herschel wanted to name the planet after King George III. Others suggested that he named the planet after himself, since he was the one to discover it. Astronomers finally settled on naming it Uranus, after an ancient Greek God.

I decided to research the discovery of the planet Uranus. I found an article that gave great information about how it all happened. William Herschel had a hobby of learning about astronomy and often read many books on the subject. He would look through telescopes but found that they were too weak, so he built his own. He was able to see further than everyone else with his telescopes. One day he came across a larger body in the Gemini nebula so he shared it with others and with their help he was able to be awarded and known for discovering Uranus. I think it’s interesting how he shared it with others and they gave their input and helped him to prove his theory. I learned that most discoveries come from being close to something and wanting

Galileo might’ve been the one to observe the sky and beyond with his newly improved telescope, but he was not the one who discovered these two giants. Uranus was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 and Neptune was found by John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Leverrier in 1846.

The discovery of Uranus is quite interesting because it wasn’t something that people were expecting. The known planets at the time were Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Williams Herschel had a strong interest in astronomy. He was a firm believer that there was life out in the universe besides just on Earth. He was a very smart man who studied astronomy in unconventional ways. Other astronomers were interested in studying the positioning of stars and orbits. Herschel was searching for something. He went as far as building his own telescopes which turned out to be superior versions then what other astronomers used. He spent a lot of his nights looking through theses telescopes for signs of life out in space. This was

William Herschel discovered Uranus in March of 1781. He discovered this threw a telescope. It was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope. Many other scientist that saw this through a telescope thought that Uranus was just a star, but Herschel was able to identify that one of those stars was an actual planet. He was fascinated with the natural philosophy of light and with the behavior of the eyes was the counterpart of this task.

After the word of his discovery made its way around, the king granted a salary to Herschel, allowing him to focus only on his astronomy studies and quit his day job. It paved the way for better telescopes which lead to further exploration, and it broke wide open the possibility of more findings, since this was the first discovery of a planet since history began being

Through studying Uranus, scientist have discovered that Uranus has a thick layer of gases that surround the planet, they have also found that there are